Introduction

My
thirty-year-plus journey in the free energy and other
milieus might be called, “the pursuit of abundance.” While some popular
concepts allude to an abundance paradigm, such as “win-win,” the scarcity
principle is so deeply ingrained in humanity that even imagining abundance
can seem impossible. For instance, an impressive scholar such as Richard
Heinberg cannot seem to conceive of abundance, but frames the world situation
in an “endless growth/overshoot-and-collapse” dichotomy. R. Buckminster
Fuller believed that humanity’s seemingly intractable resistance to the idea
of abundance is because scarcity has been the human
reality for so long that the zero-sum-game is
virtually cemented into human consciousness. The fact that scarcity is currently
being artificially forced onto humanity for reasons
of earthly power makes the pursuit of abundance even more difficult.
Even those who truly try to comprehend abundance have a difficult task,
and this essay is intended to make the abundance principle clearer.

Economics
and Energy

Life on earth has always been
powered by sunlight; the energy captured via photosynthesis
has been the basis for virtually all ecosystems. Without energy, there is
no life. Scientists think that trees are adaptations by plants to get their
leaves closer to the light, so they can absorb more than the shorter plants that
stand in their shadows. Flowering plants produce fruit to attract animals, which spread the
seeds while eating the fruit. A class of mammal evolved opposable thumbs and toes to better navigate
tree limbs while seeking fruit and other tree-borne foods. Eventually some
primates left the trees, most likely for food-related reasons. Some of those
primates learned to walk erect and lost their opposable toes, which freed their
hands for other uses. Those primates developed larger brains, and after
millions of years of adaptation to changed environments and circumstances, anatomically
modern humans appeared somewhat more than 100,000 years ago. Humanity’s
early migrations, adaptations and tool making
were always primarily concerned with acquiring, preserving
and consuming energy.

About
40,000 years ago, humans improved their hunting
technology and tactics to the point where they became super-predators, and thereby
conquered most of the world’s land-based ecosystems, eventually inhabiting all
continents except Antarctica. They also contributed to the extinction of
nearly all the planet’s large, easily killed animals, particularly
large mammals. When the easy meat was gone the Domestication Revolution occurred, apparently
independently, in Mesoamerica (today’s Mexico), China, and the Fertile Crescent
(Iraq, Egypt and vicinity). Domesticating plants and animals allowed humans
to become sedentary, because more energy per acre was extractable. Populations
thereby became denser, and civilization developed. Economics is the study
of humanity’s material wellbeing, and the bedrock economic reality has always
been the human stomach. From the beginnings of the Domestication Revolution,
about ten thousand years ago, to the Industrial Revolution, about two hundred
years ago, the primary preoccupation of most humans was obtaining enough food
to eat.

The
Industrial Revolution was dependent on harnessing
amounts of energy not previously exploitable, and today’s Americans consume about
eighty times the energy provided by their diets. Americans are also history’s
fattest and most sedentary humans, with most of
the industrialized world not far behind. Energy consumption
is by far the most important measure of a society’s economic production and standard
of living. Great Britain has one of earth’s most educated and affluent societies,
while Ethiopia has one of earth’s least educated and poorest societies, but their
economic production divided by their energy consumption is almost
exactly the same ratio. The same is true for all the world’s societies,
from the richest to poorest. Modern economic theory, however, has largely
obscured that relationship, and the main reasons, I think, follow.

When
humans became sedentary and civilizations appeared, human health declined.
Early agriculture did not produce healthy diets, particularly the dead
food between harvest seasons, and early civilizations
were not clean. There also was not enough to go around, so the beginning
of civilization has been called the transition “from egalitarianism to kleptocracy.” Economic, political
and social stratification accompanied civilization’s development. All political
systems for all time have been primarily concerned with who received the benefit
of the scarce and energy-dependent economic production and, as Fuller stated,
all political actors are “stooges” of the economic interests. Professions
appeared and “elites” ascended the hierarchies. Economic elitism has always
been the hallmark of all elites, with the elites of all civilizations engaging
in conspicuous economic consumption as a mark of their status. Those
at the hierarchical bottoms, such as slaves, barely eked out existences while
elites lived in opulence. That situation was due to economic scarcity.

Economics
is generally separated into three parts in modern study:

The production of wealth;

The distribution (or exchange) of wealth;

The consumption of wealth.

As
noted above, economic production is almost entirely dependent
on energy usage. Consumption is the use of that economic production.
The distribution/exchange aspect of economics is about who
gets to consume the production. Money, banking, accountants, laws – in short,
what passes for economics today – are primarily concerned with the exchange aspect
of economics. In a world of scarcity, who owns what becomes the overriding
concern, which is why economics is so focused on the exchange aspect, particularly
in daily life. In ancient civilizations, slaves gathered/produced the wealth
while the elites consumed it. The exchange aspect was largely concerned
with separating the slaves from the fruit of their labor, for elite benefit.
That basic dynamic has been repeated in all civilizations to the present day.
Socialism and communism have been conscious attempts to ameliorate that dynamic,
but are still rooted in the assumption of economic scarcity. The
main difference between capitalist and communist theory was who should receive
the benefit of the scarce resources. Capitalism averred that the capitalists,
who cleverly organized the system for their benefit, should get the lion’s share
of economic production. Communism stated that those doing the hard work
should receive a fair share of their production. In the industrialized world,
machines perform all the truly heavy lifting. While capitalism has been
reliant on violence and coercive exploitation,
communism was forced egalitarianism. In practice, both systems have violated
people’s free will.

It
is no coincidence that slavery first appeared in early civilization and disappeared
in early industrialization. Energy was the reason. That American consumption
of eighty times their dietary calories has been called the
equivalent of having eighty slaves. That
is the Industrial Revolution’s central dynamic. With energy slaves performing
work, human slaves became impractical, although economic exploitation for elite benefit is still
a primary aspect of how economic systems function. Economic, political and
social systems are still steeply hierarchical, with America’s richest individual
(Bill Gates) possessing as much wealth as about half of America’s poorest citizens
combined, for a wealth ratio of around one-hundred-million-to-one, a disparity
greater than any in history. In order to accept or defend
such an obviously unfair situation, people have had to cultivate many
egocentric delusions that are based on the scarcity principle. The human
ego is our collective Achilles’ heel.

Every
civilization has ridden atop its energy consumption, which is a fact that most
of civilization’s inhabitants never learn, conveniently forget or minimize.
All collapsed civilizations disappeared largely due to depleting
their energy sources, and knowledgeable observers
of today’s world realize that industrialized civilization will collapse unless
non-fossil-fuel energy sources are discovered
and used. The motivations behind all wars for all time have been primarily economic, although the elites have always
conjured and sold the masses superficially-noble motivations (self-defense, religion,
nationalism, humanitarian, spreading freedom
and democracy), as naked self-interest rarely sells well. Regarding the
economic motivation behind wars, no current example could be more obvious than
America’s invasion of the Middle East (and its current saber rattling with Iran
and Venezuela), as the U.S. seizes control over the world’s fossil fuel deposits,
which power the world economy. Predictably, the American
media has dutifully parroted the Bush administration propaganda nearly verbatim,
and virtually never even mentioned the motivation that is obvious to everybody
on earth, except brainwashed Americans. The
sitting president, vice president and secretary of state are all former oil industry
executives.

Today’s
Westerners would benefit from thinking about how energy consumption makes their
modern lives possible. Everything material in our lives, be it wood, food,
water, metals, glass, plastics and so on, has been made available by harnessing
energy. All of our transportation, electronic communication, human-friendly
environments, appliances and other modern amenities rely on energy for their existence
and performance. Without energy, it all comes to a sudden halt.

Exuberance
Is Not Abundance

Many years ago, Carl Sauer,
one of the greatest academics that America has yet produced, stated that modern
ideology extolled ever-increasing economic production and a fresh planet begging
to be filled with people, but that such ideology ignored the fact that the West’s
“progress” came at the cost of the “permanent impoverishment
of the world.” Sauer stated that such recklessly optimistic ideas were
the result of an attitude born from Europe’s conquest
of the world. Julian Simon was a modern apostle
of that attitude. I call it “rape-and-plunder economics (AKA Vulture Capitalism).”
Europe’s global conquest was an economic undertaking before all else. Everywhere
Europeans appeared, the native peoples were devastated because Europeans put the
natives under the yoke (Spain in the New World,
Britain in India, several imperial players in Africa), exterminated them in order to seize their
land (England/Britain and America in the New World, Britain in Tasmania/Australia), or destroyed the native environments
via economic exploitation (America and Spain
in the New World).

William
Catton echoes Sauer’s theme in his Overshoot. Catton’s work is called
neo-Malthusian, as it repeats the “dismal science” observation of Thomas Malthus,
which essentially states that people will always outstrip their energy supply.
In Malthus’ pre-industrial world, the energy came largely in the form of food.
There is little intrinsic difference between a calorie of food delivered to the
human stomach and a calorie of gasoline delivered to an automobile’s fuel tank.
Both sun-based energy sources are used to power human activities; gasoline calories
are simply substituted for food calories in moving people across our planet.

Catton called that reckless
optimism “emotional exuberance,” and defined it as an “almost euphoric mood” that,
in the context of his work, meant the emotional high that comes from burning through
one’s resources before they are all used up (“environmental exuberance”) and the
inevitable collapse ensues.[1]
That exuberance was due to people's being unable or unwilling to see that using
something up far faster than it could be replenished would end in a grim “morning
after” when the resources were depleted. That “exuberance” is another variation
of the zero-sum-game, and the losers in the exuberant
pillage of resources (mainly energy, but also people) are simply ignored.

Catton’s
concept of “exuberance” is virtually unassailable, and aptly describes the European/settler-state
mentality for the past several centuries. However, such egocentric exuberance
has nothing to do with an abundance mentality. The exuberant mentality states
that “there is always more where that came from,” even if there was not (also
called the “cornucopian” paradigm).

“Sustainable”
Does Not Mean Abundant

With the understandable
horror that accompanies comprehension of the West’s amazingly shortsighted and
rapacious economic systems, the concept of “sustainability” is being promoted
in many places. No industrialized society has come close to being sustainable,
not when its primary resource is being used up about a million times faster than it was created.
Environmentalists have adopted the “let’s ride bikes” philosophy, and are ideologically
opposed to the idea of abundance, preferring austerity (the opposite of
abundance) solutions, the kind that Fuller said were doomed.[2]
Also, many Westerners have looked to the pre-industrialized world for examples
of “sustainable” societies. The concept of sustainability being promoted
is this: humans can “sustainably” harvest ecosystems. In pre-industrial
cultures this has often been the case, such as the Pacific
Northwest culture, the Great Plains culture, the
Eastern Woodlands culture, the New Guinea Highlands culture, perhaps the Amazon
culture and some others. Those cultures did not engage in deforestation
and plow agriculture, which eventually turns fertile land into desert,
as it has in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere. However, those
kinds of sustainable solutions are not based on the abundance principle either.
It is still a zero-sum-game, and in those instances our fellow creatures paid
the price. Humans caused the displacement/extinction
of the native flora and fauna wherever they showed up over the past 50,000 years
or so. In addition, most if not all pre-industrial sedentary cultures had
some form of forced servitude. There may be no “golden age” of the human
past, and definitely not an abundance-based one.[3]
When Europeans conquered the world all those years ago, they unleashed another
wave of displacements/extinctions, but that time the pre-industrialized peoples largely went extinct.
Today’s popular concept of “sustainable” is still scarcity-based.

What
Does Abundance Look Like?

As stated
earlier, a “win-win” concept is based on abundance and might be what everybody
would prefer, although younger souls may rather
play the “I win, you lose” game. What is true abundance, and what does it
look like? Many people are envisioning an abundance-based world today, but
very few have addressed economic abundance and how it would be almost entirely
dependent on energy abundance. Unless there is economic abundance, the rest
of the abundance ideas probably cannot happen.

Free
energy is the key to making an abundance-based world feasible. People living
in abundance not only would never engage in warfare,
they would harm no living thing, or as close to that ideal as is possible.
In an abundance-based world:

All of our food
would be produced with nearly zero environmental impact; we would not dominate/exploit
ecosystems to serve human needs;

People would almost exclusively be vegetarian
(eating nothing with a brain);

We would not need to ravage
the earth to obtain metal, glass and other materials;

The exchange aspect of economics would
either disappear or become of minimal importance, as nobody needed or wanted to
keep score anymore; money, accountants, lawyers and other exchange-related professions
would largely disappear; if there was still scorekeeping taking place, it would
account for the well-being of every living being, not just human welfare;

Concepts of right and wrong would largely
disappear, because the cost of being “wrong” would not threaten anybody’s survival;

Because our material needs could be met
without exploiting other life forms (even plants), the “cornucopian” paradigm
would become reality, because there would always be more where that came from,
and nothing would be harmed to get it;

Very little human effort would be required
to provide life’s necessities, and that effort would be freely given for the benefit
of all.

With
an abundance-based reality, human intelligence and manipulative ability could
be directed toward making the world a better place and having fun instead of exploiting
and violating each other. There are other visions of an abundance-based
world that might make the concept clearer, and some follow.

The
television show Star Trek, especially The Next Generation series,
depicts a world partly based on abundance. Onboard the starships are replicators
that provide any kind of food, clothing or other material that people need.
In that reality, money became an obsolete concept. No Star Trek episode
I know of portrayed the situation, but imagine if a man from today’s world was
planted in a room with a replicator and he spent a day replicating food, piling
it in a corner. Then he replicated a huge wardrobe of clothing. He
then began replicating gold and diamonds, piling it in another corner. In
a few days, he filled the entire room with replicated goods; both the necessities
and what we today call “luxuries.” He then went to the holodeck and created
a virtual paradise, replete with a harem. He would gorge himself and sleep
on piles of gold with his virtual women, but he might eventually realize how silly
his behavior was. If he did not realize his folly in a reasonable length
of time, Captain Picard or Counselor Troi would gently ask what he was doing.
He would eventually realize that in a world of abundance, his behavior was crazy.

Michael
Roads recounts many incredible mystical experiences in his books, but the
most amazing was his first, which propelled him into his journey. In his
Into a Timeless Realm, he described his visit to two future earth civilizations,
about three hundred years into our future. Those two civilizations explored
the two “extremes” of the love principle: those who
chose love and those who did not. He first visited a hellish and steeply-hierarchical world
that made Blade Runner’s Los Angeles pale by comparison. In a world
where all people were primarily serving themselves, everybody lost. Then
Roads visited the world where people chose love,
and had a joyous experience almost beyond imagining. As a species, we are
today facing a divine paradox: only by caring for each other can we save ourselves.

Neale Donald Walsch’s
“God” would call the loving world Roads visited one populated with “highly
evolved beings.” In societies of highly evolved beings, the abundance
principle reigns and the time spent at their “jobs” is called “joy time,” and
such efforts are how they fulfill their souls. Nobody performs a “job” that
they hate in those societies.

Fuller
said that when economic abundance came to pass (if we did not destroy ourselves
first), humanity would still have plenty of issues to deal with, such as two men
falling in love with the same woman, but humanity’s efforts would be directed
more toward self-realization than survival.

What
if instead of eighty times the calories available from our
diets, a level which only some industrialized peoples enjoy today, all
humans had access to energy a thousand times greater than our dietary calories?
If every human had a thousand “energy slaves,” (or ten thousand) and their use
harmed nobody, would there ever be want again on this planet? The technology exists today to make that a daily
reality for all humans.

Abundance
can become humanity’s reality, but we first have to imagine what it would look
like. Do we want to pursue abundance? The choice is ours.

Footnotes

[2]
My opinion that environmentalists are hooked on austerity and are ideologically
opposed to an abundance concept has been formed from many years of interacting
with them and watching others attempt to interest environmentalists in free energy.
Richard Heinbergis merely one
example of many.

[3]
See, for instance, Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, chapter 17, “The
Golden Age That Never Was.”